The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Is Secretly an Incredible Multiplayer Game

In a way that I've only experienced before with Dark Souls.

By
Alanah Pearce

The week before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild released, there were only three of us in the office who were able to play it. We spent that entire week pulling each other into meeting rooms, sharing the incredible things we found or mechanics we discovered out of earshot of anyone who wanted to avoid spoilers. And then the game came out, and it kept happening with the addition of more and more people in our office who found things the three of us hadn’t. And now the game has been out for two weeks, and it’s still happening. It’s happening on Reddit, and on YouTube, and our ‘holy crap, I found this!’ has turned into ‘holy crap, check out what this person found!’ and there’s no end to that marvel in sight.

In that, Breath of the Wild is one of the most social, community-driven games I’ve ever played, despite not having any systems in place to formally facilitate multiplayer. I’m talking to other players about it more than I’ve ever spoken to anyone about Overwatch, even in-game. I’ve spent more hours playing Zelda on a Switch while another player was playing on a TV in the same room, excitedly showing each other the things we’ve found, than I’ve spent playing couch co-op in the past five years combined, and there’s good reason for that.

I’d argue that the thoughtful value placed on open-ended progression, without any tutorial, encourages conversation more than my experience with, say, vanilla Destiny did (maybe Dark Souls is the closest parallel). It makes active effort to let you do so many things, and just as active an effort to let you figure the limitations of those things out entirely on your own. I’m thankful that people respond to Zelda’s encouragement by making YouTube videos and starting Reddit threads, because it means I keep learning things about Breath of the Wild that it didn’t tell me. People are doing incredible things with stasis and magnesis, including completing 20-minute Shrines in less than one, and they’re almost all a product of “huh, I wonder if this will work?”

Some of the approaches to in-game physics could be called exploitation, but the physics are in the game for a reason, and there’s never anything to stop you from approaching puzzles or environments in unconventional ways. If anything, it thrives where you have the freedom to approach things creatively. There is absolutely nothing in place to prevent you from bypassing a locked gate and simply stasis-jumping over a wall, and I don’t doubt that the development team actively decided against using invisible walls to prevent that. Breath of the Wild actively encourages experimentation, and lets us be the community of scientists, offering peer-reviews and building upon each other’s ideas, instead of telling us how the game should be played from the start.

I constantly want to be around people who are playing.

Beyond that, Breath of the Wild’s social success probably stems from its uncanny ability to make you feel like the things that happen in game are happening exclusively to you, on your save file. There are plenty of games that let you explore a world at your own pace, and a smaller handful that let you choose what order you want to approach main quests in, but very few that give you an overwhelming sense of ownership over a world like Breath of the Wild does, and that ownership of discovery constantly encourages us to share what we’ve found. That’s probably in large part thanks to the ability to climb everything, and approach every inch of the map completely uniquely. It keeps us learning things that feel unique to our experience, because, in execution, they are. There isn’t anything in the game world that tries to funnel us all in one specific direction, and because of that, I constantly want to be around other people who are playing to learn from them, even peripherally, and those people tend to want to share things.

It honestly might be the perfect combination of tools in a video game, given to anyone who wants to buy it, to promote conversation and discovery. In that, a single-player game has quickly become one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had, and I think I’ll remember the constant elation I’ve felt this month for the rest of my life.

Alanah Pearce is an Editor at IGN, and she has put 80 hours into Breath of the Wild so far. You can find her on Twitter @Charalanahzard.